Locust
The Devastating Rise and Mysterious Disappearance of the Insect that Shaped the American Frontier
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
Throughout the nineteenth century, swarms of locusts regularly swept across the continent, turning noon into dusk, demolishing farm communities, and bringing trains to a halt as the crushed bodies of insects greased the rails. In 1876, the U.S. Congress declared the locust "the single greatest impediment to the settlement of the country." From the Dakotas to Texas, from California to Iowa, the swarms pushed thousands of settlers to the brink of starvation, prompting the federal government to enlist some of the greatest scientific minds of the day and thereby jumpstarting the fledgling science of entomology. Over the next few decades, the Rocky Mountain locust suddenly -- and mysteriously -- vanished. A century later, Jeffrey Lockwood set out to discover why. Unconvinced by the reigning theories, he searched for new evidence in musty books, crumbling maps, and crevassed glaciers, eventually piecing together the elusive answer: A group of early settlers unwittingly destroyed the locust's sanctuaries just as the insect was experiencing a natural population crash. Drawing on historical accounts and modern science, Locust brings to life the cultural, economic, and political forces at work in America in the late-nineteenth century, even as it solves one of the greatest ecological mysteries of our time.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
There's no dearth of eye-opening facts in this mostly fascinating, occasionally daunting, story of scientific sleuthing. Among them: North America is now the only inhabited continent without a locust species; in the years of greatest plague, 1874 1877, voracious swarms devoured half of America's annual agricultural production; the vast infestation of 1875 comprised perhaps 3.5 trillion locusts, an incomprehensible biomass stacked as much as half a mile high, 110 miles wide and 1,800 miles long; and (Fear Factor fans, take note) locusts, along with grasshoppers and crickets, were touted by one early entomologist as a nutritiously efficient food source. Lockwood (Grasshopper Dreaming), who fancies himself the Columbo of this particular disappearing-bug mystery, sometimes loses his lay readers in the fussiness of scientific methodology and the minutiae of genus nomenclature including why the still-extant grasshopper is not a locust (however, the aside, "We spend a lot of time peering at grasshopper penises," does cut nicely through the fog of jargon). His account details years of combing crumbling archives, dissecting desiccated specimens and finally drilling into fast-melting Rocky Mountain glaciers to retrieve slushy locust body parts an obsessive quest to discover why a species unexpectedly vanished a century ago in just a few years. This is a compelling work of popular science and ecological conjecture, buttressed smartly by an observant cultural, political, agricultural and economic history of 19th-century frontier America.
